Slavery continues to haunt. The rituals of domination and submis-
sion, the interplay of taboos, especially those involving interracial
sexuality, require concentrated scholarly inquiry, not another season
of neglect.

—Catherine Clinton, 1994

RINGWOOD’S Journal was the first popular magazine published
in the United States by and for African American women. It was
also a late-nineteenth-century attempt to come to terms with the
meaning of antebellum rape and its impact on the lives of women
who were the offspring of such violence. Though still a child
when enslaved, as an adult, the magazine’s founder, Julia Ringwood Coston, would repeatedly turn her gaze toward the tangle
of her southern family history as she rewrote and represented her
heritage and its association with rape in the most positive light
possible. While for many nineteenth-century African Americans,
light skin and white features would come to be highly prized as
markers of class privilege and status, until late into the nineteenth
century, light skin and white features on an African American
body signified interracial rape in the minds of white nineteenthcentury Americans. As a result, the cultural project undertaken in
the pages of Ringwood’s Journal had personal ramifications for
those who produced the publication. They were interested in
turning on their head the widespread beliefs about their bodies,

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